Conventional image processing devices perform multi-page printing by reducing each page a document into 1/N size where the document is structured with N pages (N is equal to or greater than 2), and by arranging the reduced documents on one page of a recording sheet. Such a device is disclosed, for example, in Japanese laid-open application publication number 2005-193559, paragraphs [0033]-[0055], FIGS. 1 and 5.
However, because the aforementioned conventional image processing devices uniformly reduce all pages of the documents of N page(s) into 1/N size, when different sized documents are included, an image of a smaller document is reduced with the same reducing ratio as for a larger document. Thereby, the image of the smallest document becomes so reduced (unnecessarily) that the image of the smaller document might not be readable. For example, when one page of A3 size document and one page of A4 size document are both printed by the multi-page printing on one page of an A3 size recording sheet, each of the A3 size and the A4 size documents is going to be reduced to ½ size. As a result, the image of the reduced A4 size document becomes too small to read.
The disclosed device and method operates to solve the aforementioned problems.
In particular, even when different sized documents are conducted for the multi-page printing, the images of smaller documents are printed in a proper (readable) size.